In the present day, beamline ion implanters employ multiple components to direct an ion beam from an ion source to a substrate. In order to properly treat a substrate, the ion beam may be accelerated to a target ion energy, and may have the trajectory and shape manipulated by various beamline components to produce a set of target characteristics of the ion beam at the substrate. In many types of ion implanters, including medium energy and high energy ion implanters, an acceleration column(s) may be employed to accelerate or decelerate an ion beam in order to generate a target beam energy. A given acceleration column may include many electrodes arranged in electrical series fashion to accelerate an ion beam. For example, an acceleration column may include multiple electrodes having apertures to conduct the ion beam and arranged to increase a beam energy by applying a series of different potentials to the different electrodes. In this manner, the ion beam is accelerated according to the different potentials applied to the electrodes.
Depending upon the particular design capabilities for an apparatus, such as a targeted maximum beam energy, a component such as an accelerator column may be elongated along a beam axis to a length of one meter or more. Often an internal diameter of such a component may be on the order of a few hundred millimeters of less, rendering the component relatively inaccessible for manual repair, maintenance or cleaning.
With respect to these and other considerations the present disclosure is provided.